fsck on Rspberry Pi (possibly other systems too) (#8090) · Issues · alpine / aports

fsck on Rspberry Pi (possibly other systems too)

Installing Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi SD Card revealed a bunch of bugs belonging to fsck of OpenRC startup:

The Raspberry Pi Boot Partition is a DOS FAT32 Partition, so the dosfstools package is required else the fsck crashes sometimes horribly because of the missing fsck.vfat.

… but just installing the package dosfstools, got the Pi unable to boot successfully. It took me some time to find the reason for this. The OpenRC file system check uses the Busybox fsck, which call the fsck helpers. For the FAT partitition this is called as:

from Busybox fsck =>fsck.vfat -p -C0 UUID=xxx…

fsck.vfat is symlinked to fsck.fat, so is the command dosfsck, but it does not understand the -C0 option like the ext2/3/4 handlers. So the fsck dumps the usage text on startup, and then the startup crashes due to fsck exit code. Won’t let you get to a working logging prompt this way.

… but removing -C0 option another problem is revealed. dosfsck doesn’t understand the UUID=… or LABEL=… syntax, it needs the bare block device name … but usually the partition is setup in /etc/fstab with the UUID methode.

The easiest workaround is, to remove the symlink from /usr/sbin/dosfsck to fsck.fat, rename fsck.fat to dosfsck, and create an fsck.fat shell script wrapper:

cd /usr/sbin
rm dosfsck
mv fsck.fat dosfsck
echo “#!/bin/sh” >fsck.fat
chmod 755 fsck.fat

This at least let the Raspberry Pi successfully boot with unmodified OpenRC scripts. Usually a quick helper in this situation, until we get some other changes on this topic.

… and this also effect other systems (tested on x86_64) which include a FAT partition on there disk setup, so it is not a specific Raspberry Pi problem.

(from redmine: issue id 8090, created on 2017-10-31, closed on 2017-11-29)

Installing Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi SD Card revealed a bunch of
bugs belonging to fsck of OpenRC startup:

The Raspberry Pi Boot Partition is a DOS FAT32 Partition, so the
dosfstools package is required else the fsck crashes sometimes horribly
because of the missing fsck.vfat.

… but just installing the package dosfstools, got the Pi unable to boot
successfully. It took me some time to find the reason for this. The
OpenRC file system check uses the Busybox fsck, which call the fsck
helpers. For the FAT partitition this is called as:

from Busybox fsck =>fsck.vfat -p -C0 UUID=xxx…

fsck.vfat is symlinked to fsck.fat, so is the command dosfsck, but it
does not understand the -C0 option like the ext2/3/4 handlers. So the
fsck dumps the usage text on startup, and then the startup crashes due
to fsck exit code. Won’t let you get to a working logging prompt this
way.

… but removing -C0 option another problem is revealed. dosfsck doesn’t
understand the UUID=… or LABEL=… syntax, it needs the bare block device
name … but usually the partition is setup in /etc/fstab with the UUID
methode.

The easiest workaround is, to remove the symlink from /usr/sbin/dosfsck
to fsck.fat, rename fsck.fat to dosfsck, and create an fsck.fat shell
script wrapper:

cd /usr/sbin  
rm dosfsck  
mv fsck.fat dosfsck  
echo “\#!/bin/sh” &gt;fsck.fat  
chmod 755 fsck.fat

This at least let the Raspberry Pi successfully boot with unmodified
OpenRC scripts. Usually a quick helper in this situation, until we get
some other changes on this topic.

… and this also effect other systems (tested on x86\_64) which include a
FAT partition on there disk setup, so it is not a specific Raspberry Pi
problem.

*(from redmine: issue id 8090, created on 2017-10-31, closed on 2017-11-29)*

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